You're going to international sites. Those aren't the ones being shutdown. Only Chinese sites have these instructions. See sina.com or games.com.cn or others.
If you didn't bother to RTFA, here are a few more pertinent details. The specific actions Adobe will take include:
Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
Publishing the Adobe Flash Cast protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
Removing licensing fees - making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free
This is huge in that it means we can finally start porting the Flash runtime to other platforms. It's not yet completely open source, but I'm encouraged by the steps Adobe is taking. They're at least moving in the right direction.
Basically, Jack Cafferty called Chinese products "junk" and their leaders "basically the same bunch of goons and thugs as they were in the past 50 years."
The AP has an interesting story on the Chinese backlash, and points out that CNN is only available at select locations in China (offices and hotels where foreigners will be) and otherwise censored.
If the Chinese think Jack's comments are bad, wait until the Olympics hit.
The situation just further highlights how the differences in understanding between the West and China. I think Peter Hessler explained the Tibet situation very well back in 1999:
Another aspect of the Chinese duty in Tibet is the sense that rapid modernization is needed, and should take precedence over cultural considerations. For Westerners, this is a difficult perspective to understand. Tibet is appealing to us precisely because it's not modern, and we have idealized its culture and anti-materialism to the point where it has become, as Orville Schell says, "a figurative place of spiritual enlightenment in the Western imagination -- where people don't make Buicks, they make good karma."
But to the Chinese, for whom modernization is coming late, Buicks look awfully good. I noticed this during my first year as a teacher in China, when my writing class spent time considering the American West. We discussed western expansion, and I presented the students with a problem of the late nineteenth century: the Plains Indians, their culture in jeopardy, were being pressed by white settlers. I asked my class to imagine that they were American citizens proposing a solution, and nearly all responded much the way this student did: "The world is changing and developing. We should make the Indians suit our modern life. The Indians are used to living all over the plains and moving frequently, without a fixed home, but it is very impractical in our modern life... We need our country to be a powerful country; we must make the Indians adapt to our modern life and keep pace with the society. Only in this way can we strengthen the country." Having lived in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong has helped me see both sides of this debate, and it's fascinating how difficult it is for the two sides to comprehend one another. I wrote more about this in my blog a month ago.
Most of my contributions were on website documentation, wikis, or mailing lists, which aren't included in these metrics. At the moment, a lot of my commits are done on repositories not directly available to the public. While I don't really need Ohloh to tell me if I've contributed to a project or not, it's still a little annoying.
And what about contributors who submitted patches that had to be committed by someone else? Or people who contribute by providing help on IRC channels, blogs, forums, or other mailing lists?
While ohloh metrics can be useful, they also need to be taken with a grain of salt, particularly the contributor metrics. They're a bit more useful on measuring a project as a whole (but they still miss a lot of activity).
My first recommendation would be to try Blueprint -- a set of reasonable CSS styles that make building grid-based layouts much easier. It's open source, designed by some great people and actively supported.
If you're looking for full designs, try Open Source Web Designs. There are also other free template sites out there, so search around.
Even more interesting was the bit about DVDs coming with iTunes compatible versions on-disc. Think about it -- you no longer have to rip your DVD movie. You can directly copy it off of your DVD. That's a great idea.
It's exactly these sorts of vaccinations which mutate and go horribly wrong, leaving the surviving population nothing but roaming, ravenous zombies, avoiding sunlight and eating the few unaffected survivors. I know what I'm talking about. Stay away from this! When you're stuck in an abandoned shack and the zombies are beating down the door about to eat you, don't say I didn't warn you!
Yes. Apache is a US charity under Section 501(c)(3) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. See the donation FAQ.
Furthermore, Apache is still almost completely a volunteer organization. The board members, officers and members do not take a salary from the donations. The only paid staff the ASF now has include a PR person, a system administrator, and a part-time secretary.
Yeah, I completely missed the middle of the series. Played the first ones and then some of the recent ones since X. But I always loved Dragon Warrior. That was the best.
I agree that there are definitely some people who want to delete to readily, but then again there are people who are pushing trivia on Wikipedia, which is not good.
Why is trivia bad?
Seriously. What's wrong with more articles? Why would wikipedia ever reject a voluntary contribution?
Extra articles don't clutter up wikipedia. They simply don't get looked at. So what? Who cares? Let them sit there. If someone wants to improve them, let them. If no one looks at them, then they aren't harming anyone. The elitism that's taken hold in wikipedia is an antithetical to the very principles on which it was founded.
And there's a good follow-up by one of his coworkers:
We've been extremely happy with Rails, and make use of the multitude of helpers that it offers us - like any application on any stack, though, providing fast response times to a (rapidly) growing number of users is a challenge. The solutions are often tightly coupled to the application and its characteristics, and while scaling the most trafficked Rails site in the world, we've run into situations where existing solutions weren't enough.
Rails is best at database baby-sitting, which is not what Twitter is about and it's understandable they would have issues. Ruby is slow and we need a good virtual machine. Nevertheless, Twitter does run on Ruby which shows that it can be made to scale. Not that Twitter is a good measure of anything other than, well, Twitter. And I'm sure someone could have done it with PHP, Python, Erlang or C.
Which is always why blanket statements about languages and platforms is always a bad idea. Just look at the comments on this article. It's just a chance for everyone to trumpet their favorite web framework or language. Sure we have our favorite tools, but most of them suck at one thing or another.
I've never used Ruby or RoR... my experience with PHP is limited as well...
In other words, you were trolling.:-)
Having done websites in PHP, Rails, Python and Java, I can say that they all suck one way or another. Ruby and Rails are both very different from PHP and my personal unconfirmed suspicion is that a lot of the Rails problems people have are from programmers who jump over into Rails without first learning what they're getting themselves into. Deploying Rails can be very difficult and you can face a lot of issues that you would never face for PHP.
Personally, I prefer Python or Ruby over PHP any day.
What about the requirements of the, you know, actual website application?
You've provided no information on the actual website that you intend to develop. That's the important part -- the features and functionality to the customers and end users.
Instead of considering the features of the language and framework first, how about the features of the application? How many users? Who will be supporting it? What kind of server resources are available? Do you need internationalization? What's the roadmap for the site over the next 3 to 5 years? Maybee then you can map the features of the website to the features of the framework or language, such as the maturity of the libraries directly related to your webapp.
But picking the implementation language independent of the functionality of the website is a classic sign of solving the wrong problem. I don't care what you program it in, if you're asking these questions first, you are programming it in the wrong language.
Why can't Apple just sell an unlocked phone and really help change the market? Is it the visual voicemail app that needs operator support? Is Apple going to negotiate contracts in every country? What a mess.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because it's not international sites that have these instructions from the China government. It's internal Chinese websites. Check this out.
It was an order. Read this.
You're going to international sites. Those aren't the ones being shutdown. Only Chinese sites have these instructions. See sina.com or games.com.cn or others.
If you didn't bother to RTFA, here are a few more pertinent details. The specific actions Adobe will take include:
This is huge in that it means we can finally start porting the Flash runtime to other platforms. It's not yet completely open source, but I'm encouraged by the steps Adobe is taking. They're at least moving in the right direction.
Here's a video of what upset the Chinese:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2j2bvOq3fLA
Basically, Jack Cafferty called Chinese products "junk" and their leaders "basically the same bunch of goons and thugs as they were in the past 50 years."
The AP has an interesting story on the Chinese backlash, and points out that CNN is only available at select locations in China (offices and hotels where foreigners will be) and otherwise censored.
If the Chinese think Jack's comments are bad, wait until the Olympics hit.
But to the Chinese, for whom modernization is coming late, Buicks look awfully good. I noticed this during my first year as a teacher in China, when my writing class spent time considering the American West. We discussed western expansion, and I presented the students with a problem of the late nineteenth century: the Plains Indians, their culture in jeopardy, were being pressed by white settlers. I asked my class to imagine that they were American citizens proposing a solution, and nearly all responded much the way this student did: "The world is changing and developing. We should make the Indians suit our modern life. The Indians are used to living all over the plains and moving frequently, without a fixed home, but it is very impractical in our modern life... We need our country to be a powerful country; we must make the Indians adapt to our modern life and keep pace with the society. Only in this way can we strengthen the country." Having lived in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong has helped me see both sides of this debate, and it's fascinating how difficult it is for the two sides to comprehend one another. I wrote more about this in my blog a month ago.
The slashdotted article has a few details not in the summary, including:
So it's more of an advanced scout mission, though the chance of returning is very low
Most of my contributions were on website documentation, wikis, or mailing lists, which aren't included in these metrics. At the moment, a lot of my commits are done on repositories not directly available to the public. While I don't really need Ohloh to tell me if I've contributed to a project or not, it's still a little annoying.
And what about contributors who submitted patches that had to be committed by someone else? Or people who contribute by providing help on IRC channels, blogs, forums, or other mailing lists?
While ohloh metrics can be useful, they also need to be taken with a grain of salt, particularly the contributor metrics. They're a bit more useful on measuring a project as a whole (but they still miss a lot of activity).
My first recommendation would be to try Blueprint -- a set of reasonable CSS styles that make building grid-based layouts much easier. It's open source, designed by some great people and actively supported.
If you're looking for full designs, try Open Source Web Designs. There are also other free template sites out there, so search around.
Even more interesting was the bit about DVDs coming with iTunes compatible versions on-disc. Think about it -- you no longer have to rip your DVD movie. You can directly copy it off of your DVD. That's a great idea.
It's exactly these sorts of vaccinations which mutate and go horribly wrong, leaving the surviving population nothing but roaming, ravenous zombies, avoiding sunlight and eating the few unaffected survivors. I know what I'm talking about. Stay away from this! When you're stuck in an abandoned shack and the zombies are beating down the door about to eat you, don't say I didn't warn you!
Google is also an Apache platinum sponsor. We're happy to have both of them involved!
We have incorporated. Please see my other comment. Apache is a legal US charity.
Yes. Apache is a US charity under Section 501(c)(3) of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code. See the donation FAQ.
Furthermore, Apache is still almost completely a volunteer organization. The board members, officers and members do not take a salary from the donations. The only paid staff the ASF now has include a PR person, a system administrator, and a part-time secretary.
Disclaimer: I'm an Apache board member.
Yeah, I completely missed the middle of the series. Played the first ones and then some of the recent ones since X. But I always loved Dragon Warrior. That was the best.
Try Nearby Gamers.
Why is trivia bad?
Seriously. What's wrong with more articles? Why would wikipedia ever reject a voluntary contribution?
Extra articles don't clutter up wikipedia. They simply don't get looked at. So what? Who cares? Let them sit there. If someone wants to improve them, let them. If no one looks at them, then they aren't harming anyone. The elitism that's taken hold in wikipedia is an antithetical to the very principles on which it was founded.
And there's a good follow-up by one of his coworkers:
We've been extremely happy with Rails, and make use of the multitude of helpers that it offers us - like any application on any stack, though, providing fast response times to a (rapidly) growing number of users is a challenge. The solutions are often tightly coupled to the application and its characteristics, and while scaling the most trafficked Rails site in the world, we've run into situations where existing solutions weren't enough.
Rails is best at database baby-sitting, which is not what Twitter is about and it's understandable they would have issues. Ruby is slow and we need a good virtual machine. Nevertheless, Twitter does run on Ruby which shows that it can be made to scale. Not that Twitter is a good measure of anything other than, well, Twitter. And I'm sure someone could have done it with PHP, Python, Erlang or C.
Which is always why blanket statements about languages and platforms is always a bad idea. Just look at the comments on this article. It's just a chance for everyone to trumpet their favorite web framework or language. Sure we have our favorite tools, but most of them suck at one thing or another.
I've never used Ruby or RoR... my experience with PHP is limited as well...
In other words, you were trolling. :-)
Having done websites in PHP, Rails, Python and Java, I can say that they all suck one way or another. Ruby and Rails are both very different from PHP and my personal unconfirmed suspicion is that a lot of the Rails problems people have are from programmers who jump over into Rails without first learning what they're getting themselves into. Deploying Rails can be very difficult and you can face a lot of issues that you would never face for PHP.
Personally, I prefer Python or Ruby over PHP any day.
What about the requirements of the, you know, actual website application?
You've provided no information on the actual website that you intend to develop. That's the important part -- the features and functionality to the customers and end users.
Instead of considering the features of the language and framework first, how about the features of the application? How many users? Who will be supporting it? What kind of server resources are available? Do you need internationalization? What's the roadmap for the site over the next 3 to 5 years? Maybee then you can map the features of the website to the features of the framework or language, such as the maturity of the libraries directly related to your webapp.
But picking the implementation language independent of the functionality of the website is a classic sign of solving the wrong problem. I don't care what you program it in, if you're asking these questions first, you are programming it in the wrong language.
There was an article last year. I remember it because it's how I heard of Ptolus:
/ 0146221
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/12
Why can't Apple just sell an unlocked phone and really help change the market? Is it the visual voicemail app that needs operator support? Is Apple going to negotiate contracts in every country? What a mess.
You could always help out with Apache Harmony to create a full, open sourced JVM!
Skype is P2P (unlike SIP), so you're almost always being relayed through 3rd, 4th and 5th parties (and so on).
Also, the skype client is supposed to throttle the amount of bandwidth it uses, but whether it actually does this or not is another matter.
According to some videos I saw on YouTube (can't find the link right now), it looked like only clips over 5 minutes were pulled.